Writing at the end of a tragic and violent century, Chaucer portrays England as a discordant nation, where virtue prevails over vice and vice is an occasion for laughter rather than cause for indignation. To do so, he stages a group of pilgrims heading from London to Canterbury, who meet along the way and tell stories. There is a good-natured and somewhat prevaricating innkeeper, a modest and virtuous knight who has seen a thousand military campaigns, a learned but somewhat greedy medical doctor, and no shortage of civil servants, millers and farmers, good country parish priests, vain nuns and corrupt friars. The result is a cross-section of a mobile and restless society, whose characters seem almost like our contemporaries. Therein lies Chaucer's true masterpiece: in the vividness of the subjects depicted in the frame to the actual tales.
The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (20 books). Illustrated : The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Romaunt of The Rose, Minor Poems, Boece and others
Chaucer Geoffrey
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The Classic of British literature. Illustrated : The Canterbury Tales, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Daughter of Time
Chaucer Geoffrey, John Bunyan, William Shakespeare, Bacon Francis, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Mary W. Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Herbert George Wells, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Josephine Tey
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer Geoffrey
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